We Don’t Actually Care About the Future

For years now, I’ve preached that writers don’t actually care what anyone thinks of their work. I know we all think we care, and much of our misery grows from this belief, this trying to please others, to be told by someone else whether our work is valuable. Only they, these other people, these readers and editors and agents and critics know. We don’t. The problem is that when we’re writing, when we’re deep in that flow, the one thought we never have is, “I wonder if anyone else will like this?” Because in our hearts, in reality, we don’t actually care.

Of course, unless we’re in the middle of a class or reading editor’s notes, learning what someone else thinks of our stories always occurs in the future. The future, I’ve come to realize, is where the really bad stuff in life can happen. And by bad stuff I mean some condition will arise – some rejection, test result, or lover leaving – because of which I will be incapable of being happy, perhaps ever again. If I can’t be happy, what is the point of living? I can’t think of one.

Which is why I don’t think anyone, myself included, actually cares about the future. Just like other people’s opinions of our work, we certainly believe we do. Oh, do we ever. I have spent much of my life more or less consumed with thoughts of future, wanting to arrange it so that I can ensure the tragedy of failure or loss is avoided, that I won’t find myself in the Hellscape of joylessness. Yet all this worry – and that’s all that it is – was merely a futile attempt to secure my happiness. What if, Worry asks, I get There, the future, and I’m bored or scared and depressed?

Being bored or interested, happy or sad, frightened or calm, always occurs in the same place: the here and now. That’s where life happens, and where I experience it, where I feel everything. All I have ever actually cared about is how I feel right now. As an ambitious person, which most writers are, this is a little hard for me to accept. My ambition is aimed forward, toward creating what will one day exist in the future. That aim, that desire, is the fuel that keeps me moving, isn’t it? But for that interest in what will be, might I not just sit around doing nothing?

No. That wouldn’t be any fun. Everything I do that has ever led to anything I’ve wanted to share with anyone has come from having fun making it. Fun happens now and nowhere else. Love happens now, joy happens now, anger happens now, grief happens now. In fact, I have spent much of my life dreaming of the time when my situation will be such that I will never again have to care about anything other than how I feel in the moment. That’s the dream, which I can begin living, if I choose, if I accept, right now.  

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com